Abby Schachner
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By PJ Grisar December 3, 2018
Coming Forward Is No Joke
It takes a lot of courage to be a performer and comedian. Illustrator and storyteller Abby Schachner may have more than most.
In November 2017, Schachner was one of five women to speak to The New York Times about Louis CK’s inappropriate sexual behavior. The choice to come forward about a phone call she had with CK in 2003 in which he acted inappropriately played a role in his subsequent confession to sexual misbehavior, as well as in his partial ostracization from the comedy community.
Schachner’s comedy often plays on her own fears and anxieties. She has written over a dozen solo shows including “Jew Must Be Crazy,” “Plate,” about eating disorders, and “Shadow Kissers,” about her fear of intimacy. She’s also been known to use events from her life as creative fuel. Her parent’s divorce, which allegedly involved her father Sheldon hiring a hit man to kill her mother (the attempt was unsuccessful), was the subject of her solo show “Schachner v. Schachner.”
“I was told never to talk about my life,” Schachner, a graduate of Wheaton College, a liberal arts school in Massachusetts, told the Wheaton Quarterly in 2016, “yet I wanted to slip it in almost everything without explanation, and some things warrant an explanation … if only for yourself.”
— PJ Grisar
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news this Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
